National Energy Falsehoods

Obama’s Energy Fantasy
This is not a political newsletter. However, the recent US State of the
Union address contained so much fantasy that it is hard not to point it out. I truly
worry about the real state of the US when what the president says is accepted so willingly by so many
people. It is as if no one any longer expects anyone to tell the truth. The following short
essay is by a former Obama supporter who is an energy expert. It is from James Kunstler’s blog
of 30 January:
“Well, he had to get up there and say something. In this particular
winter of our discontent,the wispiest nostrums and baldest lies will do. America is not interested
in reality. America is a nine-hundred pound man imprisoned in a fetid trailer bedroom begging
for one more case of Little Debbie Cocoa Cremes before the front-end-loader bashes through
the wall to haul him to intensive care. America just wants to hear another story about its
own wonderfulness before that happens.

The Weber Global Opportunities Report 17 1 February 2012
America’s soul is so lost that it has disappeared into the same cosmic wilderness that MF Global’s client accounts were last seen entering. “Mr. Obama keeps telling nationwide audiences that “we have a supply of natural gas that can last America nearly 100 years.” That is just not true. If he believes
it then he is either:
1) getting treasonously bad advice from dishonest advisors or 2) not reading reports issued by his own agencies, or
3) just making shit up. This was the same week, by the way, when the US
Department of Energy dropped its estimate for the Marcellus shale gas play by 66
percent, while the estimate for all US shale basins went down 42 percent. The shale gas
industry is another Ponzi bubble that is about to founder on a scarcity of investment
capital. Just watch.
“The “energy independence” trope is a lie, too. At least in the sense that Mr. Obama means –
that we can run the suburban SUV monstrosity and all its accessories by other
means than fossil fuels. He just says it because it makes voters feel better. By the time
they find out it was just a story, he won’t need their votes anymore. Meanwhile, we’ll do nothing
to prepare for a different way of life, and so, necessarily, the result will be an obscene
scramble for power and resources.

“The topper for me, though, was the President’s cheeky announcement that he’d ordered the
Department of Justice to form a “special unit” to investigate mortgage fraud and other lethal
irregularities in the banking sector. The fact that his congressional audience did not bust out
laughing shows what a convocation of craven and perfidious cat’s paws they are. Note to
readers: the DOJ has a long-established criminal division fully empowered to prosecute all
the familiar scams of our time from NINJA lending to the robo-signing of titles to MERS
mortgage mischief, to the bundling and sales of booby-trapped CDOs – up to and including
whatever Jon Corzine thought he was doing at MF Global.

“Notice how lame the major newspapers and cable news networks were in
responding to Mr. Obama’s impudent japery. None of them, including The New York Times,
bothered to ask Attorney General Eric Holder what he’s been up to along these lines for
the past three years. It is really hard to account for the stupendous incompetence of the news
media in recent years. Of course, I’m allergic to conspiracy theories and the only
explanation that adds up for me is the diminishing returns of technology. Among other untruths we’ve
embraced collectively is the idea that computer-distributed information amounts to
knowledge and understanding, tending toward judgment. Apparently, it’s only made our
society much dumber and more irresponsible. After all, none of the supposed media watchdogs
even asked The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal, or CNN and a hundred other
outlets why they didn’t interview the Attorney General of the United States and ask him
why he has not been taking care of the business now assigned to this special unit.